[foundation-board] follow up questions
Jane Silber
jane.silber at canonical.com
Wed Sep 20 08:08:04 UTC 2017
Hi Mark, Pavel -
A couple follow up thoughts after a night of tossing and turning:
1. One thing that wasn't clear to me in last night's conversation is
cash flow - specifically, when is the cliff (at current spend rate)?
This is different than the date by which we would need to make cuts,
which needs to be well in front of the cliff (to Tim's point about not
waiting until it's too late to cut). But I think clarity on the cliff
(i.e, "we can't pay bills or employees any more") will help bring focus
to the speed at which we need to get the financial health on a better
track in order to back away from that dangerous cliff edge.
2. I spent more time with the 2018 spreadsheet, and I can't understand
the connection between the Income Pipeline tab and the income section on
the OKI Planned Budget tab. I don't see formulas which link the two
tabs, nor do I see a clear correlation between the numbers. Can you
explain exactly how these two tabs are related?
3. Related to #2 above, I can't tell how large the funding gap is. The
budget has a deficit of -366K. Does that mean we need to find an
additional 366K in SAG, which implies additional 2018 overall funding of
2.4M (at 15% rate) beyond what is in the budget?
4. The other thing I'd like to mention with regards to the "safe"
scenario budget you are preparing is that (in my opinion) we only want
to make one round of cuts, as opposed to multiple rounds of shaving
smaller pieces off. The latter is much harder to recover from in terms
of trust and morale. And while the former is much harder initially, it
should ensure safety and provide an ability to regrow when finances
allow. If we end up in that scenario, I think we have to stomach deep
cuts to ensure the future of the org rather than optimistic shaving of
costs.
thanks
Jane
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